For example, the shippers of the rising Greek cities who took pottery jugs filled with oil or wine to the Black Sea, Egypt or Sicily to exchange them for grain, in the process took away, to people of whom their neighbours knew virtually nothing, goods which those neighbours themselves much desired. By allowing this to happen, members of the small group must have lost their very bearings and begun to reorient to a new comprehension of the world, one in which the importance of the small group itself was much reduced. As Piggott explains in Ancient Europe, ‘Prospectors and miners, traders and
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